I'll be honest, I've often wandered over to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show website, but I've yet to do more than see if there are any free stories up or peruse a few of the articles in each issue. It's not the price that has kept me from buying, it's pretty darn cheap for the amount of stories in each issue, but for whatever reason I've held off. If the eighteen stories in the newly released Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show (IGMS) anthology are a good representation of the quality there, however, then I've made a mistake and have lot of reading to do. IGMS showcases the best from, I believe, the first four issues and makes for some great reading for those who can't get enough of the
short form.

Editor Edmund R. Schubert has also opted to do something that I wish
a lot more anthologies would. After each story there is a short one
or two paragraph, occasionally reaching an entire page, afterword from
the author. The first anthology that I read that incorporated this
was Paragons, edited by Robin Wilson, and I've always wondered why it
wasn't done more often. Now Paragons features essays after each, and
the focus there is more on the crafting of a short story, but it's the
same idea. It's a great way to delve a bit deeper, to find out how
this or that story came about. It's one small touch, certainly, but
it added to the book as a whole and, for me anyways, made the
experience a little richer. For those of you who don't want to know,
or don't care, how the tale comes about then skip them. If it's the
meat and potatoes you came for you won't be disappointed.

For brevity's sake I won't touch on each story and every story, and
rest assured that those I'm skipping aren't bad, I'm just going to
review the ones in the anthology that I really liked. The ones that,
like a good short story will do, stuck with me long after I set the
book down.

I'll start with Card's "Mazer in Prison". It follows Mazer Rackham as
he takes a solitary loop through space, for no other reason than that
Earth needs him to be their commander once the fleet has made it to
Bugger territory. I first read Ender's Game a long time ago, but I
wish I'd known what is revealed about Mazer at that time. Card hadn't
written the story at the time, of course. I don't recall much, if
anything, Card has written about Mazer before to be honest. Strictly
reading about Mazer in Ender's Game doesn't give the character
justice. Seriously, if Card wishes to write another in the Enderverse
I hope he gives us a story about Mazer during the first Bugger war.
We also get a bit of Graff in this story, although his appearances are
taped recordings, his negotiating with Mazer to help them in a
different way. It's a great set-up to Ender's Game, at least those
two characters, and one of my favorites in IGMS.

I'll cut to my favorite right now. "To Know All Things That Are In
The Earth" by James Maxey is a post-apocalyptic tale of angels
appearing on Earth. When they begin dragging people off with them the
world believes it's the Rapture or End Times, and those left must not
have been truly saved. What they find out as the story goes along,
though, turns that theory in another direction that I don't wish to
give away. Would it ruin the story? It might not, but the joy of
Maxey's short is in the discovery and what the characters really
believe. Like Eric James Stone's "Tabloid Reporter to the Stars",
this story touches on how perceptions shape action. The afterword by
Maxey is both touching and why I mentioned earlier that these brief
story biographies greatly enhance your reading. "To Know" has become
one of my favorite short stories, a list that's pretty long but that
contains stories that are of the near and dear variety.

The third story that really impressed me was "Dream Engine" by Tim
Pratt. Set in a world that is some kind of hinge in the universe, a
world in which people and things can be pulled from other worlds when
they're close enough, "Dream Engine" was a blast to read. Some detail
that really pulls you pops up on seemingly every page and that's
important to me when reading about a city or place that's so unlike
those from other stories. But I like stories with weird cities, and
Nexington-on-Axis fits that bill perfectly. Pratt, in talking about
his weird city in the afterword, describes the population of the city
as magpies of the universe and that sums it up better than I probably
could. But even under the neat idea of a place that takes what it
wants from other places, including entire buildings being pulled and
placed in the empty quarters of the city, the story is very well done.
Howlaa Moor, a shapshifting/city enforcer, and his partner Wisp are
sent out to find and stop what they think to be an unstoppable entity
that's accidentally been pulled down with the other stuff by the
coty's creep 'orphans'. This is another story that I hope gets made
into a novel. It's great stuff! Highly imaginative, with humor and
action perfectly spread throughout.

That's one of the things that I thoroughly enjoyed about IGMS. A lot
of the shorts were ones I felt could be expanded into novels, or the
ideas within used as the basis of a book. "Respite" by Rachel Ann
Dryden, is the story of two colonists fighting for their lives as well
as each other, on a planet quite a bit more hostile than they'd been led to
believe. The ending is horrific, but the setting would make for an
extremely interesting book. And "Audience" by Ty Franck has a
similarly interesting future setting that begs for more exploration.
Granted, not all of the shorts in this anthology would work in the
novel form, but even those that wouldn't are as good as those that
would.

IGMS Volume 1 features newcomer and veterans alike, and is a showcase for
the quality stories over at the IGMS website. Highly recommended as
you'll probably be reading stories from the future heavy weights of
the SF/Fantasy genre.

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